


Supermassive

by jokocraft



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Extended Metaphors, M/M, What if Byleth never returned in crimson flower route?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25824040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokocraft/pseuds/jokocraft
Summary: All the great heroes stargazed.
Relationships: Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24





	Supermassive

In the years before the war, Edelgard and Hubert would conclude long nights of strategy with stargazing. All the great heroes stargazed. All the great leaders and wise men, matriarchs and reformers included in their histories or writings or records an instance of looking up at the stars and finding something.

Edelgard said she saw jewels, the most valuable jewels to ever exist, because they were gorgeous and revered but impossible to procure by even the most powerful of men. They were untouchable. Immortal.

Hubert told her one night of how the stars could burn any man or king or goddess alive in an instant. Edelgard had nodded at this, and having found whatever it was she needed, never stargazed again.

But sometimes Hubert still tilted his head up, facing that vast array. The jewels up there were indeed untouchable. But he had not corrected Her Majesty on the subject of their mortality.

*

Edelgard said on the eighth anniversary of their war’s commencement, to the few thousand remaining of their troops, that she wanted Dimitri’s heart cut out before the end of summer.

Time dragged, battles more so, but both sides refused to let the war end. Her Majesty’s generals hardened and hardened again, letting the last remnants of their humanity crumble away as they rose to their feet another hundred times.

The last day of summer, heat warped the air and warps heated it further. Bodies lay strewn miles in all directions in a complete ravaging. Under the beating sun, Hubert watched a blood-soaked horse limp across the field, its rider’s hair and armor equally stained. Ferdinand stared ahead with eyes that stood out like beacons on a dark red sea, and approach where Dimitri still knelt.

Hubert gathered his strength to stand and stumbled forward. He wondered, lightheaded, if this was a mirage.

Ferdinand dismounted and retrieved Areadbhar from a weak grip. He turned the lance and pressed the blade gently against Dimitri’s neck, coaxing him back like a healer coaxing a patient to rest. Ferdinand leaned down over him, hair falling in matted clumps, and said something to him. Hubert would never know what.

Then came the sound of blade hitting stone, Dimitri’s resting place. Hubert ascended the few worn steps and looked down on the flesh and bone of severed neck. Ferdinand pulled out a small dagger and imbued it with a reeking, necrotic magic until the blade glowed purple. He cut Dimitri’s chest armor down the middle as if the Kingdom’s strongest alloys were nothing but tough fabric, its finest clothes the surface of water. Ferdinand cut into chest.

When the ribs were exposed, Ferdinand set down the dagger and removed his gauntlets and gloves. Hubert watched as Ferdinand broke each bone one by one.

*

When they were children, before Edelgard was taken, Hubert read all manner of things, like poetry and banned scientific studies. He found a lot of it surprisingly sound, and some of it, even profound. He remembered in particular reading about the phenomena of supernova.

A gorgeous, monumental end—spent burning indefinitely hotter, consuming itself for fuel, pushing against the gravity all around it until there was no fuel left. Gravity closed in, collapsing the star until it erupted, blindingly bright, outshining all other stars, outshining entire galaxies.

*

Stepping over Dimitri’s body, Ferdinand approached Hubert and fell gracelessly to one knee. Holding the heart in twitching hands, he looked up into Hubert’s eyes with only one of his own, the other shut and bleeding.

“This is for you,” he mumbled, exhaling with effort and rasping in again. “To give to her.”

*

Fear was the simplest thing to conquer when in service to a great power. This was Hubert’s view of things. Granted, the service must be all-consuming, and the power must be so great that even burning away to dust is still to remain within its wide darkness. What is there to fear as a part of the greatest scheme?

Hubert looked up one evening near the beginning the war. How very far apart they all were, he remembered. How endless the stretches between each little light. So dim—so dim were they in the infinity of it all, they may as well be as small up close as they were in the sky. Hubert found this comforting.

But then another evening years later, he looked up and remembered something else. That there were exceptions to that holy, dark isolation.

There were some stars, the scientists wrote, that burned close together, even orbited one another. If they got too close, one star consumed the other to become a more massive entity than either would have been otherwise. Merged, they died soon and stunning.

*

After so long an attrition, Dimitri’s death put the Kingdom out of the fight. Rhea, meanwhile, had only gotten stronger, out to save her own kind to the very end.

Edelgard did not agree to surrender. She did not blink at the threatening, draconic displays urging her to do so, and so Rhea decided upon a day of reckoning, choosing a date placed perfectly between the other holidays, as if she were planning its worship already.

Her Majesty did agree to this. And as that day approached, her closest Generals, Vestra and Aegir, were to be left alone.

Hubert taught Ferdinand the most lethal magic he had learned from the bowels of Fódlan’s ancient knowledge. Ferdinand made it deadlier. An unstoppable weapon of war, or a heightened state of being. Or both? Yes, an attack of the very air, Ferdinand theorized, affecting their enemies from the inside. If properly protected, their allies would not suffer. It could be bloodless, if only technically.

Ferdinand took evil and made so terribly good, Hubert was certain it could tempt heroes.

The night before their final stand, Hubert took Ferdinand stargazing. After a week of rain, there was finally a clear sky, and Hubert had been bothered lately by the mystery of what fundamental mistake had Ferdinand made to end up here, beside him.

Tall grass brushed against their limbs, and a breeze stirred the trees around them. Hubert’s mystery was solved soon enough, after he explained to Ferdinand how all the greats in history seemed to find something in the stars to keep them going. Ferdinand stared up with one eye, the other closed forever but never covered, and Hubert could not help but ask what he saw. Ferdinand turned over and kissed him.

*

He should have been nothing but another burning force in the dark. Nothing close to him enough to see his end, nothing bright enough nearby to fizzle and die and leave him adrift in the endless nothing, cursed with knowledge of something else’s warmth.

What should have been meant nothing anymore, however. There was still nothing to fear—all Hubert had do was pull his counterpart closer and closer and closer until there was, by any measure, only one person.

*

“A black hole,” Ferdinand said. “What is that?”

Hubert turned to another chapter and pointed at the illustrations and diagrams. The most massive of stars collapsed into round blights on the old, worn pages.

“A maw,” he answered. “Consuming everything that comes too close.”

Should he ever have a choice, Hubert would want no writings of his history as a hero or a villain, no records or stories. No metaphors of how he lived and died, and no pithy remarks on what he might have found looking up at night.

He would choose only to immortalize the memory of Ferdinand smiling, stretching the ill-healed slash on his lip and the burn scars mottling his complexion. His hair pulled back and graying. “Everything? How frightfully beautiful.”

*

Rhea breathed and screeched as her holy fleet and sanctimonious soldiers dropped all around her, smoked out, burnt hollow. Crest weapons made no difference. Ancient dragons fell as flimsy as the youngest in arms.

Soon, only the false goddess remained to confront the true emperor, who stood framed by a set of mismatched eyes.

Her Majesty gestured forward, and the war was soon and stunningly ended.


End file.
